Using xargs with git

Question

I am reading instructions here: http://developer.android.com/training/in-app-billing/test-iab-app.html

and it says to upload your app (which I did) and then I would be able to create billing items for it. But I do not see a way to create the items for users to purchase. Could someone please list the steps to do that?

Thank you!

Solution

xargs -0 means to use only null bytes to separate input records, and include newline characters and other whitespace in the input. You're going to have a newline at the end of the revision output there, which head and cut will leave there, and which will be included in the argument given to git. Git doesn't like that. I think you've edited the newline out of the error message, but it is actually a part of the message here and what's causing your problem.

Removing -0 makes your command work for me. Given the input you're generating, the default newline-separated behaviour of xargs is safe.

You don't really need to use -I {} in this case either — git is quite happy to have the revision as the last argument, but I guess you're using it for practice's sake. By default, xargs just puts the arguments at the very end of the given command (unlike find -exec, which uses the {} substitution).

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You're also doing a bit much work, though, with your cut. Git is more than capable of arranging its output in a format you can use with xargs. Using the --pretty=tformat... option we can make it spit out just the SHA1 hashes, one per line:

git log --author=jim --grep="patch" --pretty=tformat:'%H'

will output all the hashes of matching commits in your repository, one per line. --pretty sets the output formatting; tformat means to put a newline at the end of every hash; '%H' means the hash.

You can pipe that into xargs, and since the entire input is "clean" [a-f0-9] you can use it with the default line-separation

Comments

[Jim]

But why doesn't the first version without -0 and without -I work?

[Michael Homer]

xargs doesn't use {} for substitution. That's find. xargs just puts them at the end by default, unless you use -I.